Bowerick Wowbagger
- “It was alien, very alien”
- —Wowbagger's description[src]
Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is an immortal being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order.
When this proves to be taking too long, he decides to insult one whole planet at a time, using huge loudspeakers.
He finally insults the Great Prophet Zarquon, who kills him, ending Wowbagger's eternal suffering.[1]
Wowbagger insults gods to get them to kill him. He partially succeeds when Thor hits him so hard that he loses his immortality. After that, he lives happily ever after with Trillian.[2]
Description
Wowbagger was quite tall and had a peculiar flattened head. He had slitty alien eyes, golden robes with a peculiar collar design and pale grey-green skin that had a lustrous shine. He had thin spindly alien hands.[3]
Insults
Three years after Arthur Dent was stranded in time on prehistoric Earth, Wowbagger appeared to insult Arthur, saying "You're a jerk, a complete kneebiter. (Life, the Universe and Everything). In "...And Another Thing", it says he called him a "jerk, a complete arsehole".[3][4]
When Arthur left prehistoric Earth and returned to the present day, Wowbagger showed up, consulted his clipboard and asked, "I've done you before, haven't I?"d
He also appeared at Lords Cricket Ground, during the Krikkit robot attack, to insult the dying Arthur Deodat, calling him a "no-good dumbo nothing."
He called Zaphod Beeblebrox "a fat arse".[2]
Appearances
Bowerick Wowbagger appears in:
Behind the scenes
- In the new radio series, he is voiced by Toby Longworth.
- Wowbagger is also present in the Douglas Adams short story The Private Life of Genghis Khan, where he insults Genghis Khan, provoking him to burn down large segments of Asia. This short story, published in The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, was written in 1975, three years before the first Hitchhiker's radio series.
- Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was the inspiration for an insult generation program of the same name, originally available on Atari ST computers but later rewritten for Windows-based systems.
Notes and references
- ↑ In the radio show
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 From the Eoin Colfer novel And Another Thing...
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 From the Douglas Adams book Life, the Universe and Everything.
- ↑ This was changed to "...complete kneebiter" in the US versions.